Sara Mead is a senior associate with Bellwether Education Partners who writes about education policy, with particular attention to early childhood education, school reform, and improving educational outcomes for low-income students.

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August 16, 2011

A lot of early ed folks have been tweeting and recommending this recent NPR story that calls preschool "the best job training program," provoking a lot of eye-rolling on my part. Look—I support high-quality pre-k as much as anyone. There's strong evidence that the "soft skills" James Heckman t...

June 07, 2011

The Department of Education chose to release the new i3 competition notice of applications on Friday, so I'm just getting around to looking at them today. A few big changes from last year worth noting:
Smaller maximum awards: Given the smaller overall pot of funds ($150 million this year, compared...

June 07, 2011

Interesting new report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center looks at how families with young children are using and dealing with media. It's a great look at how (and how much) parents use media with their kids, what kinds of technology kids are using and have access to, what parents think about kids and...

February 17, 2011

Mark Kleiman, who is an incredibly smart man, has a great line on education technology:
And that, in turn, is why the discussions about "educational technology" always seem so bizarre to me. It's as if vaudeville promoters in 1920 were discussing whether they should start using loudspeakers or dis...

January 28, 2011

Atul Gawande's latest New Yorker article on efforts to rein in health care costs by better serving the highest-cost/highest-need patients is great reading. But this paragraph near the end particularly jumped out at me:
Yet the stakes in health-care hot-spotting are enormous, and go far beyond heal...